YOU HAVE A NEW MEMORY

A trip into social media.

In her debut book, writer, artist, memer, and influencer Arata gathers 10 essays about power, identity, commodification, and, not least, reality. Like Umberto Eco in Travels in Hyperreality, Arata depicts a world of fakes, artificiality, and commercialization: in short, the seductive milieu of cyberspace. “In Real Life,” the title of an essay about her 10-day stay at a Carthusian cloister, could serve for many other pieces, as well, in which she contrasts the world of the internet—“AIM, LiveJournal, chatrooms”—with tangible, physical spaces. Real-life interactions, she admits, leave her feeling anxious, while social media offers a chance at transformation. She writes, “There was nothing remarkable about me—nothing special enough to justify my existence—but if I posted enough for my twenty-eight friends, the meaning of my life might come together, the mundane made lapidary. Better than the right to exist: the right to be someone else.” Becoming an influencer enhances that sense of being someone else. Influencers, she asserts, are “power traders of the attention economy, they mediate the sharp sleaze of advertising into something soft and trustworthy.” Besides the huge amount of free merchandise companies shower on influencers, she’s even more excited by the ability to affect people’s behavior. “The impulse to influence was humiliating, but also intoxicating, or maybe intoxicating because it was humiliating,” she writes. “I could easily, happily, sell and be sold.” In “My Year of Earning and Spending,” she recounts both sides: ghost-writing affiliate memes for an ad agency and buying useless stuff with her earnings—slick polyester sheets, pink platform crocs, a subscription to Enchanted Living Magazine. Narcissism, the compulsion to post, sincerity, and authenticity thread through Arata’s essays on the chaos of memedom and the heady influencer economy.

Acerbic reflections on being digital.